In Planetary Conquest, players attempt to conquer "New Earth" one region at a time. Several players fight each other to conquer a given region. In these regional battles, players maneuver military units around a simple ANSI map using their cursor keys.

Screen capture of a Planetary Conquest II gameplay session

Amit Patel created Planetary Conquest in 1991. He has said that he took inspiration from chess, in setting the game around a "board" with a finite number of pieces. In this way, Planetary Conquest differs greatly from Patel's first game, Solar Realms Elite, where objects are "continuous." In contrast, the number of objects in Planetary Conquest is kept small so that each can be unique and important. [1]

Planetary Conquest's map-driven user interface is also unique among the SRGames, which typically had a scrolling text interface.[1]

Planetary Conquest was not as popular as SRE. Patel said that because SRE had more users, he spent more time improving it, while Planetary Conquest languished.[1]